Internet Censorship: Freedom vs Security

The internet as we know it today has transformed itself from the world’s only nuclear strike resistant communications network, into the world’s only true medium of free, uncensored speech. It was thought that the internet would improve and increase global human development through the promotion and easy transmission of ideas and thoughts. However, in these past few years, we have noticed unexpected developments in this field. Various corporate and government entities are trying to monitor, censor and altogether control this once free internet. With entities such as SOPA, PIPA, TPP, Patriot act, Telecommunications act and India’s very own ICMS challenging and threatening the very notion of human freedom, it is important to educate people regarding the very force that is trying to corrupt this publically owned network. In this paper we will be covering the security aspect of Internet domain. As we all know, the internet was invented in The USA by the name of ARPANET, and was originally intended to be used as a nuclear strike resistant network. It consisted of only a handful of nodes, and was not even used to connect computers together at its first inception. The USA has been the pioneer of internet and wireless communications since then, and has held on to all the powers that hold the internet together since then. They own all 14 of the DNS servers throughout the world, without which the internet cannot translate human readable addresses into computer understandable addresses. The USA has shut down many websites that were hosted on the domains of other countries. Thepiratebay and wikileaks are prime examples, and many more are being discussed as we speak. With the reducing cost of technology and easier access, The USA has already implemented a nationwide monitoring system called PRISM, which monitors and records all real and digital movement in the country.

Abstract—The internet as we know it today has transformed
itself from the world’s only nuclear strike resistant
communications network, into the world’s only true medium of
free, uncensored speech. It was thought that the internet would
improve and increase global human development through the
promotion and easy transmission of ideas and thoughts.
However, in these past few years, we have noticed unexpected
developments in this field. Various corporate and government
entities are trying to monitor, censor and altogether control this
once free internet. With entities such as SOPA, PIPA, TPP,
Patriot act, Telecommunications act and India’s very own ICMS
challenging and threatening the very notion of human freedom, it
is important to educate people regarding the very force that is
trying to corrupt this publically owned network. In this paper we
will be covering the security aspect of Internet domain. As we all
know, the internet was invented in The USA by the name of
ARPANET, and was originally intended to be used as a nuclear
strike resistant network. It consisted of only a handful of nodes,
and was not even used to connect computers together at its first
inception. The USA has been the pioneer of internet and wireless
communications since then, and has held on to all the powers
that hold the internet together since then. They own all 14 of the
DNS servers throughout the world, without which the internet
cannot translate human readable addresses into computer
understandable addresses. The USA has shut down many
websites that were hosted on the domains of other countries.
Thepiratebay and wikileaks are prime examples, and many more
are being discussed as we speak. With the reducing cost of
technology and easier access, The USA has already implemented
a nationwide monitoring system called PRISM, which monitors
and records all real and digital movement in the country.

Keywords— e-Censorship, Internet Governance, DNS Injection,
SOPA etc.

Introduction
The internet as we know it today is the world's
largest platform for free speech and expression. It is
a highly interconnected mesh of millions of
computers connected together throughout the world
to form what we call the World Wide Web. It keeps
billions of people connected to each other, and life
today would be very different without it. The world
at our fingertips, as some would call it, the internet
brings together people of separate nationalities,
speaking different languages, and bridges the
cultural divide unlike nothing else in the world, and
has stayed strong through the years until today. The
internet has helped destroy cultural stereotypes, and
has provided an outlet for individuals to voice their
opinions against unfair and unlawful ideology and
practices. The speed and flexibility of internet data
routing protocols is due to the network being
designed with failure in mind. The network
continues to function even if a large part of it is
taken offline. This is due to the decentralized nature
of the internet. That is, it is independent of any
central entity which controls the functioning of the
internet. However true this may be, various forces
of political and corporate agenda are creeping
closer and closer to their ultimate goal of corrupting
the very fabric that keeps the internet free and open
for all its participants. These forces are mainly of
American origin namely SOPA (stop online piracy
act), PIPA (Protect Intellectual property act), The
Patriot act and The Telecommunications act. Also,
India's very own ICMS (Indian Central monitoring
system) [4] has also recently been seen in the news.
The implications of large scale monitoring are huge.
The technical difficulties behind monitoring of
internet communications and its censorship are
relatively similar, so any act of unlawful monitoring
also poses a potential threat of censorship also.
China and North Korea are prime examples of this
phenomenon. India is obviously not too far behind
in this field. If uneducated regarding the
consequences, our citizens might become victim to
permanent large scale wire-tapping and we might
possibly become another China.
The first step of this journey will question the
motives of the forces behind such practices, and
throw light on how internet censorship affects daily
life on a global scale. The second step of the
journey is a hunt for alternative technologies and
International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) – volume 4 Issue 8–August 2013

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practices to help safeguard ourselves from the evils
of censorship. We might go deeper into the internet
to locations called the dark net; i.e. a part of the
internet that is securely cut-off from the rest of the
internet(called the surface-net) and is kept secret
from prying eyes, by means of strong , open-source
cryptographic security and alternative routing
mechanisms to achieve true online anonymity.

Literature Survey
Bothma et. al. discussed that censorship is no
longer limited to printed media and videos [1]. Its
impact is felt much more strongly with regard to
Internet related resources of information and
communication such as access to websites, email
and social networking tools which is further
enhanced by ubiquitous access through mobile
phones and tablets. Some ISPs and governments
use DNS injection [2] to block access to
“unwanted” websites. The censorship tools inspect
DNS queries near the ISP’s boundary routers for
sensitive domain keywords and inject forged DNS
responses, blocking the users from accessing
censored sites, such as twitter and facebook.
Unfortunately this causes collateral damage,
affecting communication beyond the censored
networks when outside DNS traffic traverses
censored links. Xueyang et. al. explored where
Intrusion Detection System (IDS) devices of the
Great Firewall of China (GFC) are placed for
keyword filtering at router level [3]. Knowing
where IDSes are attached to better understand the
infrastructure of the firewall, gain more knowledge
about its behavior and find vantage point for future
circumvention techniques.

Bridging the gap between Early Internet & modern Internet
In 1993, Time Magazine article quoted computer
scientist J ohn Gilmore, one of the founders of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, saying "The
internet interprets censorship as damage and routes
around it”. We might also wish to look at the
fundamental property of the internet and confirm
this statement by ourselves. The internet was
designed as the world’s largest mesh network,
designed to provide connectivity to data by
ensuring that data packets are capable of choosing
their path of least resistance to reach their
destination. If any routes are blocked, or taken
offline, the network displays a unique form of
“Intelligence” by effectively re-routing the data
through an alternative route. Technical routing
algorithms such as TTL and QoS are capable of
doing so effectively, making censorship just an
inefficient routing nuisance [5]. However, in the
past few years, it has become obvious that
censorship is now being driven by the full force of
the law, and will be possibly used along with many
such flimsy excuses such as “National security”,
“Piracy prevention” and even “Cleaning up the
internet”. As such, there exist 2 types of Censorship:
Technical and Non-Technical censorship
Technical censorship is an implementation of
software and code to track and censor the users of
internet services by means of many techniques such
as IP Filtering, DNS Filtering and redirection, URL
Filtering, Packet Filtering, etc. There is no legal
backing behind the act of technical censorship.
These techniques may be voluntarily employed by
network administrators of educational and corporate
institutions, and might also be implemented by
countries practicing pervasive censorship such as
China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran and many
others.
Non-technical censorship is the use and abuse of
legal power to pass legislation to discourage and
suppress the right to free speech under the threat of
prosecution, monetary fines and even imprisonment.
It is usually used in conjunction with technical
censorship, although it is not 100% necessary to do
so.
Currently, the most popular method of online
censorship is the use of DNS redirection. The DNS
or Domain Name System is a collection of 14
worldwide servers that store information regarding
the IP addresses of the locations of websites,
indexed by their name. To access anything on the
internet, the data must be stored on a server, and
that server must be connected to the internet, with a
dedicated IP address. To access this server, one
must know its IP address, or the IP address must be
registered in the DNS table, which is owned by the
American organization ICANN. The DNS is needed
for the internet to work, because, one cannot
possibly remember the IP address of all websites
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that one uses, and still keep updating this list when
there is a change in server locations. One needs a
human readable address to network address
translator, whose need is fulfilled by such a DNS.
As long as a single entity owns and controls the
DNS, censorship of websites is going to be
technically very easy. A few solutions to this
problem have risen to the challenge. They are in
theory, alternative DNS systems, and need to be
configured by the browser to be used, instead of the
ICANN servers. They may be hosted on private
servers, or may be completely decentralized,
running off the resources of the computers of the
users. A few examples include OpenNIC, Open
Root Server Network, Public-root, and more
interestingly, a digital currency inspired DNS
System called Namecoin. These systems are
independent of the ICANN, and there are no legal
restrictions currently regarding their usage. The
decentralization of most online services as we move
towards the future is going to be a key factor in this
global scale conflict of interest, with many new
innovations to come and change the way we
communicate for all time.

Impact on Human Development
The Internet has been a true gift to mankind.
Using the internet we can communicate, share,
learn and teach everything from the fields of
science and art without any boundaries and
limitations [2] [3]. The internet is a crucial piece of
technology, which has successfully integrated itself
with human existence, and helped shorten gaps and
break existing barriers to help people come closer.
Without the internet, we are crippled. A very recent
example of this was when Egyptian authorities took
down the internet infrastructure during the 2011
riots. When Egyptian authorities demanded
telecommunication services to shutdown, there was
a total internet blackout. What happened in Egypt
necessitates the need to understand the entire
Internet ecosystem, when it comes to considering
the question of a censorship-free Internet. Both
children as well as adults use the internet to learn
and understand many critical problems which they
are not able to analyze in day to day life just by
themselves. The internet exposes us to good quality
information which results in cognitive development
of the mind and increases awareness of our
surroundings. The role of the internet is heightened
when it plays a part in debunking misinformation
which may be spread by political or unsocial
elements to promote their own ideology. Being the
fastest communication medium in the world, the
internet has phenomenal applications in the fields of
not just communication, but also that of information
archiving and convenient access to this vast archive.
The Internet has undoubtedly played a key role in
human social development. Websites like Facebook,
Reddit and Twitter etc help us connect with other
people with whom we possibly could not have real
human interaction. The internet besides being an
educational tool also provides access to quality
entertainment, often without any cost depending on
the sources, considering that lack of quality
entertainment affects society adversely in its own
way. The internet is always alive with debate and
conversation with its favorite topics being an
infinite spectrum of new ideas in various fields such
as politics and religion. With the world’s entire
scientific community having a strong online
presence, the internet is cheekily described as “The
place where religion comes to die”. It lives up to
this description remarkably. Due to the participants
being mostly open minded youth and scientifically
literate individuals, the life of the community is
maintained by the seemingly infinite turns that
conversations can take, all without putting any
geographical, societal or monetary pressures upon
the participants involved.
One of the rare observable negative impacts on
human development is that real human interaction
and relationships are slowly being replaced by
virtual, online ones.

Future Possibilities & Conclusion
Many websites have been shutdown under the
guise of internet security, and to safeguard from
digital piracy. Thepiratebay and Wikileaks were a
few such examples of the first websites to be
blocked from the public by many developed
countries. The United States of America were the
first to prevent their public from accessing these
websites and stated that these two websites posed a
threat to national security as well as to their
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economy, the notion of which is not yet backed
with any measurable proof.
Thepiratebay, commonly known as TPB, was
founded in Sweden by Peter Sunde, Gottfrid
Svartholm and Fredrik Neij in 2003. TPB fulfilled a
need at its time by providing a platform for peer to
peer file sharing using the Bittorrent protocol.
Bittorrent changes the way content is distributed
online by replacing the client server model with a
model where each downloader also becomes an
uploader of the data to other “peers” that may need
this data. This innovative protocol effectively
reduces the content distribution load to be borne by
the distributor. TPB has been questioned and
banned numerous times in the past. At some point
in time TPB has been banned in Belgium, Denmark,
Finland, Germany, India, China and Sweden. In
2006, many American record and media companies
collectively filed a case against TPB, charging it
with multiple counts of Copyright Infringement,
which has cost them $3.4 million. The Case’s
verdict was out in 2008 and TPB was found guilty.
TPB was shutdown, but TPB challenged the verdict,
but nothing fruitful resulted out of it. They were
sentenced to a year of imprisonment and fined $ 2,
700, 00. But in 2013 TPB was back again. TPB has
just recently completed 10 years of its life which is
a milestone for Internet Freedom and censorship-
free Internet [5]. The latest technologies in secure
communication are mainly Tor and Freenet. These
tools, along with countless other lesser known
technologies are effective against online monitoring
and censorship. The innovation and technical
competence employed by the inventors of these
technologies is the reason that these technologies
are able to promise air-tight privacy. Its anonymity
has made it popular among numerous users who are
willing to sacrifice Internet speed for privacy-
enhanced web access. But it doesn’t overcome the
threat on government/corporate control of the
Internet. The real challenge is to create censorship-
free Internet technologies which would sustain it
even when other entities are vying for control over
it. In December this year, some governments of the
world, along with a select few corporations are
having a closed–door meeting called the Trans
Pacific Pact over how the control would be
implemented to further their own agenda by putting
legal as well as technical barriers over the once free
internet. As described by the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the right to free,
uncensored speech is a basic human right, as is the
right to privacy. The Internet is the bane of all
human development and our collective future.
Putting restrictions on it will only result in large
scale conflict and revolt which is detrimental to the
well-being of both parties. If any single entity
happens to take control of the Internet then the
following is most likely to happen:

1. They will be able to observe, modify, block,
delay, replay, and modify the traffic according
to their wishes.
2. No transparency would exist as all information
would be censored, or only misinformation
would be disseminated. These entities will
obviously only publish that information which
will be in their favor.
3. They will have complete unrestricted access
over the data stored and transmitted from all
internet connected computers and smart-phones.
4. The new laws might legally enforce all
cryptographic keys to have inbuilt flaws so that
they would be remotely exploitable by these
entities.